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Titanic anniversary: the day Southampton went silent

News of disaster reaches the streets

28 March 2012 • 12:00am

In the ruins of Holy Rood Church, on the high street in Southampton, there is a memorial fountain to the stewards, sailors and firemen of the city who lost their lives when RMS Titanic sank, 100 years ago on April 15. In front of the fountain is a stainless steel "listening post" – push the buttons and Sotonians who were alive at the time will tell you what they remember of this dark day and its aftermath.

"The town went absolutely quiet," recalled one resident, Charles Morgan, who was nine years old in 1912. "A great hush descended… I don't think that there was hardly a single street in Southampton that hadn't lost someone on that ship."

The sinking of the Titanic in the North Atlantic was the most infamous and emblematic disaster in maritime history. The centenary is being marked by events across the world (see "Titanic 2012", right) – not only in Belfast, where she was built, but also in Liverpool where she was registered, in her ports of call in France and Ireland, in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where most of her dead are buried, and in other places eager to maximise tangential associations with the doomed passenger liner.

But nowhere was the disaster felt more keenly than in Southampton. The city provided most of the ship's crew and 549 people with Southampton addresses lost their lives – more than a third of the overall death toll. Ever since, the sinking of Titanic has been a sensitive subject and the city has hardly trumpeted its association with a name that has become a byword for failure and tragedy.

In May 2009, the last living survivor of the Titanic, Millvina Dean, died (she was a babe in arms at the time, and subsequently grew up in Southampton), and now, at last, the events of April 15 1912 are truly history for this proud maritime city.

Southampton's centenary commemorations will centre on the new Sea City Museum, which will open at precisely 1.30pm on April 10, 100 years to the day since the Titanic set sail. The museum, which cost £15 million, promises to "tell the largely untold and fascinating story of Southampton's [Titanic] crew and the impact the tragedy had on families in the city", as well as featuring other aspects of the city's seafaring past. In addition, a temporary exhibition entitled Titanic the Legend will examine the "industry" that has grown up around the ship and her sinking.

Before visiting the museum it's worth mugging up on the story by guiding yourself on a walk through the city, using the "Titanic Trail" leaflet available for the wallet-busting sum of £1 from the tourist information centre. The trail takes in the Titanic memorials dotted around the centre – to the postal workers, to the musicians, who continued to play as the ship was going down, to the engineer officers and to the rest of the crew – and various buildings and sites associated with the days before and after the disaster, including hotels, the old docks railway station and a pub.

Southampton is and was a thriving port. A century ago, more than 20 steamship companies were registered here and a good proportion of the population of 120,000 worked on the ships or in associated trades. Most of the Titanic's crew of stokers and stewards came from the neighbourhoods of Northam, Millbrook and Shirley. As news of the sinking filtered through these streets, carried there by newspaper sellers ("Disaster at sea! Titanic sunk!"), families converged on the offices of the White Star Line, the ship's owners, in Canute Road, near the docks.

"There were panic stations everywhere," one eyewitness recalled in another of the archive recordings available in Holy Rood Church. "Women were running out and going down to the shipping office." Canute Chambers, the Edwardian red-brick building that served as the White Star offices, is now an employment training centre and not open to the public. A plaque on the gatepost records that "It was here that hundreds of local people waited for news of their loved ones."

A week earlier, on April 10, 1912, many of those same people had gathered in a lighter mood at White Star Dock, a short walk to the west (past the former South Western Hotel, now private apartments, where many of the first-class passengers stayed on the eve of embarkation). At noon precisely the band struck up, the crowds waved and the Titanic cast off on its terrible voyage into history. The dock, renamed Ocean Dock, is closed to the public but the security guard will let you pass just beyond the barrier of Dock Gate 4 to see the memorial plaque.

It is the role of chance that makes Titanic such a compelling story. Millvina Dean survived to a ripe old age. A 19-month-old boy from Wiltshire called Sidney Goodwin perished. And three brothers called Slade from Southampton had the luckiest of escapes. If, as I was, you are delayed at the level crossing on Canute Road by a train passing from the docks, it will give you time to reflect on the fate of the Slades.

The brothers Bertram, Tom and Alfred Slade had signed on as firemen on Titanic. On the morning of departure they had been drinking in the Grapes pub in Oxford Street (it is still there and contains bits and bobs of Titanic memorabilia), until 11.50am, 10 minutes before the Titanic's scheduled departure. Staggering out, they had to wait for a docks train to pass and when they reached the ship, the gangplank had been raised and they missed the voyage.

The Grapes makes the perfect finale to the Titanic trail. Raise a glass to the Slades, and honour a community that became – and remained for many years – a city united in grief.